Privacy Policy for Monaghan Alerts

Summary

Monaghan Alerts is a free service provided by Monaghan County Council to send alerts to subscribers based on core alert categories (Road Alerts, Community/Miscellaneous Alerts, Flood Alerts, Weather Alerts and Planning Alerts). Alerts are issued by a combination of SMS, Email, app notifications and chat applications. Alerts are also geographically focused meaning the subscriber will only receive alerts based on the locations stored in their Monaghan Alerts account. At all times the subscriber is in control of what information they receive, the locational relevance of alerts, the channels used to contact them, as well as an ability to quickly unsubscribe from the service in a few easy ways. The personal data on Monaghan Alerts is limited to your mobile number, email address, IP address from web device and up to two mapped locations.

Monaghan County Council fully respects your right to privacy. The Council will not collect any personal information about you on its websites without your clear permission. Any information, which you submit via Monaghan County Council's websites will be treated with the highest possible standards of security and confidentiality, strictly in accordance with the Data Protection Acts, 1988 & 2003. This privacy statement sets out how Monaghan Alerts and Monaghan County Council (Data Controller) and Pin Point Alerts Ltd (the Data Processor and the company that runs the service) processes subscriber personal data, secures this personal data, and the various policies that adheres to General Data Protection Regulation.

The Council reserves the right to amend the scope of the privacy statement at any time which may include or exclude other sites. Identity and the contact details of the controller: The Data Controller is Monaghan County Council, County Offices, The Glen, Co. Monaghan.

Identity and the contact details of the processor:
The Data Processor is Pin Point Alerts Ltd, Burrell Hall, St. Kieran's College, College Road, Co. Kilkenny.

Purposes and legal basis for the processing

The following Personally Identifiable Information (“PII”) is gathered from registered users (“subscribers”):

1. Irish Mobile Number
Monaghan Alerts is provided exclusively to Irish phone holders. For that reason, you must have a unique login to Monaghan Alerts and your mobile number is used to create and access your account. Your mobile number will also be used to send you SMS Text Alerts from Monaghan County Council.

2. Password
You need to authenticate with Monaghan Alerts to access your account. Passwords are created at registration and they are salted/hashed on the Monaghan Alerts server – passwords are never stored in plain text.

3. Up to two stored map locations, by way of coarse map coordinates
Monaghan Alerts offers focused alerts from Monaghan County Council that are locally relevant to recipients. To make this happen Monaghan Alerts allows you to add up to two locations for which you want to receive alerts. These are branded as “Home” and “Work” locations and we also generate a route between the two locations. A minimum of one location is required while the second location is optional. It is up to the subscriber to map their location on the system and to provide the level of accuracy they are satisfied with. It is not necessary to map exactly to a home location – the centre of a town or townland is usually sufficient to ensure you get the alerts that impact you. Monaghan Alerts stores coordinates statically in a database after they are updated by the subscriber and Monaghan Alerts does not track your location at any time. Coordinates are stored as a Latitude Longitude pair.
If you provide a location at registration that is outside of County Monaghan you will receive alerts from MapAlerter for that location. Locations inside of County Monaghan will receive alerts from Monaghan Alerts.

4. Email Address
Monaghan Alerts uses your email address to send you email alerts from Monaghan County Council. The email address is a unique entity in the Monaghan Alerts database and it is also used to reset your account password, if you forget it. In extremely rare cases your email address is used to send out service updates, policy changes and changes to the Monaghan Alerts terms and conditions if further consent is required.

5. IP address
An Internet protocol (“IP”) address is the unique number assigned to your Internet communicator device or Internet Service Provider (“ISP”). Monaghan Alerts may track such IP addresses for system administration, site tracking, to prevent our servers from being abused and for other uses described in this Privacy Policy.

Our use of cookies:
Monaghan Alerts makes use of cookies, which are small digital files that are stored in your web browser, that enable us to track your return visits to our website. We use cookies to ensure an improved user experience. The purpose of cookies on Monaghan Alerts is also used to speed up the load time for web pages on subsequent visits to the website. Your browser settings may allow you to block these cookies, which is fine and the service will continue to operate, but we recommend you have them enabled to help us personalise your experience of Monaghan Alerts.

Summary of how we use the information we gather:

We use the information to allow you to manage your unique account. We require your contact details to correctly send you notifications, and we require a unique username (mobile number) for you to create an account. Your password is used to access your Monaghan Alerts account. To send you correct localized alerts and notifications we require coordinate information about your location - this can be accurate to your town/city and not necessarily to your exact home location. Mapping a point on the map is optional for your place of work (if you wish to receive notifications about your place of work).

The people that are given access to your personal information:

Monaghan Alerts is provided as a free service by Monaghan County Council (the Data Controller). Monaghan Alerts uses MapAlerter technology provided by Pin Point Alerts Ltd (the Data Processor). We will solely use your PII details you provide at registration for the purposes of identifying if you should receive a text/email/app notification and, subsequently, we will use your contact details to correctly deliver the notification and/or alert. If you provide a location at registration that is outside of County Monaghan you will receive alerts from MapAlerter (which is provided by our service partner and our Data Processor Pin Point Alerts) for that location. Locations registered inside County Monaghan will receive alerts from Monaghan Alerts.

Where does the Personally Identifiable Information (PII) database and backups reside?

All parts of Monaghan Alerts including databases and websites are hosted within the European Union. At no stage is PII transferred to a 3rd country outside of the European Union. Backups are fully encrypted and stored securely in Ireland for a maximum period of 14 days before self-deleting.

Rights of access to and rectification/deletion of personal data/Rights to object to processing.

You have the right to request for us to delete any personal data collected by us or to correct and rectify any errors in this data. You also have the right to object to the processing of your personal data. Contact dataprotectionofficer@monaghancoco.ie

If processing is based on consent, the right to withdraw consent

If the personal data we hold about you was collected based on your consent, you have the right to withdraw that consent and request deletion of that data. Contact dataprotectionofficer@monaghancoco.ie.

Obligation to provide personal data

In order to provide certain services to you, the Council requires your personal data, and cannot provide the services without this data. Where the council requires this data it will be made clear to you on application for these services, what personal data will be required to be held and processed by the Council. For more information please read the National Data Retention Policy.

Right to Complaint

If you have any concerns or complaints about the processing of your personal data or Monaghan County Council’s responses to regarding your personal data, you have the right to lodge a complaint to the Office of Data Protection Commissioner, info@dataprotection.ie. For more information please read our Data Protection Information booklet.
For further assistance on Data Protection contact: Data Protection Officer, Monaghan County Council, The Glen, Co. Monaghan
Telephone: 047 30500
E-Mail: dataprotectionofficer@monaghancoco.ie

Changes to this policy

We reserve the right to modify the Privacy Policy at any stage. If and when we make changes to our privacy policy, we'll share details of these changes on this page.

Glossary

IP ADDRESS: The identifying details for your computer (or your Internet company’s computer), expressed in "Internet protocol" code. Every computer connected to the web has a unique IP address, although the address may not be the same every time a connection is made.

COOKIES: A cookie is a block of data that a web server places on a user’s PC. Typically, it is used to ease navigation through the site. However, it is also a useful means for the web site identifying the user, tracking the user’s path through the site, and identifying repeat visits to the site by the same user (or same user’s machine). This can then lead to a web site owner being able to profile an individual users browsing habits – and all potentially done without the knowledge, or consent, of the user.